Mists and Rains (Les Fleurs du Mal)
A number of you have been asking me about the new novel, Lawless and the Flowers of Sin, which signally didn’t come out on 1 August 2014, despite Amazon’s vaunting and indeed one bookseller offering it for £45.16 (a phenomenological bargain, seeing as it doesn’t yet exist). That disappointment was due to the untimely demise of Angry Robot’s Exhibit A crime imprint, just as I was trying on my outfit for the launch party.
A number of early readers have said warm, admiring things about it, including publishers: “an elegant and vivid depiction of the setting and period,” “the seduction of the style carries right through the narrative”, “deftly conjures the atmosphere of the era”, “biting satire”. Thank you. I look forward to sharing it more widely. As the latest judge prepares for the latest enquiry, Flowers of Sin seems a timely tale.
As yet, however, I have no further news.
Patrons
In the interim, something of my sources.
I just heard David Mitchell, eloquent on the Guardian Books podcast. When being questioned about intertextuality, he deflected the discussion to more fecund and funny byways. Do readers care about intertextuality? Don’t we just enjoy the book, enjoying a pat on the back and a raise of the eyebrow if we spot thieved sources?
Here, then, I’ll detail a few of the misty thefts that led to Flowers of Sin.
Four books hold up the corners of the novel, all four from Victorian days, all ground-breaking in more or less scurrilous ways.
This first is probably the only one still considered avant-garde today, which is a good effort after 150 years. Rather than discuss why and how that should be, I shall begin my nods to the giants on whose shoulders I attempt to clamber, giants whom I regard as the patrons of the book, bowing out of critical comment in favour of a poem of Monsieur Charles Baudelaire, whose Fleurs du Mal gave me title and theme.
Mists and Rain
O ends of autumn, winters, springs soaked in mud,
Soporific seasons! I love you and invite you
To enfold my heart and my brain
In a vaporous shroud and a wandering tomb.
On this grand plain where the chill wind disports itself,
Where through the long nights the weathercock grows gruff,
My soul, more than in the warmth of reheated spring,
Will open generously her crow’s wings.
Nothing sweeter to hearts filled with deathly things,
And on which freezes have so long descended,
O feeble seasons, queens of our climate,
Than the fixed look upon your pale white shades,
—Except, on moonless eves, we two, just we,
On a bed so wild, to put our grief to sleep.
Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal
My own translation, scratched together in the dark hours
